A Youtube channel specialising in Minecraft animations has produced an incredible recreation of the recent Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer using Minecraft assets and Unreal Engine 5. Boranium Art, run by the Miami-based Ray Escobar and three collaborators, cut its teeth with an almost equally impressive recreation of the Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer a year ago (and also has a thing for Oppenheimer-via-Minecraft), but this raises the bar and then some.
Not only does this recreate the trailer shot-for-shot, but easily the most impressive aspect of it is how it captures the tonal aesthetic of Rockstar's Vice City: the neon-flecked nights, the breathtaking sun-kissed sweeps, and the grimy urban sheen. The eagle-eyed Minecrafters will spot it uses the Minecraft Story mode style for the characters, and several GTA elements have been swapped-out for Minecraft in-jokes.
But given this is the year of our lord 2024, perhaps the first important clarification is this: "It's not AI," says Escobar. He says they've been planning the video for around a year, and it was a "no-brainer" to "bridge one of the best-selling video games ever with another future best-selling one". The production took around one-and-a-half months and four people worked on it: Escobar as main animator, an assistant animator, and two builders.
"All the assets were first built in the actual Minecraft game," explains Escobar. "Only exactly what is shown in the video is actually built, to save time. Once the builds are finished, they are then exported from the Minecraft world using an awesome piece of software called 'Mineways.' After that, they are imported into Unreal Engine 5, where I sometimes spend hours lighting and re-lighting till I match or closely approximate the lighting of the original. The characters are, however, animated in Autodesk Maya, not UE5."
I ask which of the in-jokes is a personal favourite. "My favorite moment is probably the Alligator being replaced with a Drowned mob," says Escobar, "and the subsequent fire that appears when it’s pulled out of the water. I love referencing Minecraft’s mob behavior as I feel this bridges the two games perfectly."
There has been some speculation that this is recreating the parts of the GTA6 map built in the trailer, but Escobar makes the point that "the game isn't even out" and the team "only built the portions you see… even then, a lot of it is just duplicated in a subtle way."
The final thing I wondered about was why, in all of their great Minecraft projects, Boranium Art leans towards the Minecraft Story Mode style for its characters.
"Minecraft having such a simplistic style, I always felt that other animators failed to maintain this style in their characters’ faces," says Escobar. "A curved non-pixelated eyebrow, for example, really feels like something you’d never see in the game. Having played Minecraft Story Mode back when it was released, I really felt their faces were kept more in line with the simplistic style. Their mouths being pixelated and their stop-motion-like movement cements this feeling."
There's a level of attention-to-detail here that lifts this far beyond the usual, and there's definitely something special about seeing one of gaming's great creative sandboxes used to pay tribute to one of the others.
It's one of several projects spinning off Rockstar's first trailer, such as this one putting it side-by-side with real shots of Miami, which may seem overkill but this is probably going to be the biggest entertainment release we've ever seen. Just ask 2K's Strauss Zelnick: "we're seeking perfection". The only bad news is that it looks like Rockstar's going to approach the release in the way it traditionally has: GTA6 will release on consoles in 2025, but us PC lovers may well be waiting till 2026.
